Henry2 walked the streets of Newry every day wearing a fawn-coloured duffel-coat and a sou’wester hat. His gait had the characteristic rolling swagger of an old sea salt. He claimed that he was precisely that but by all accounts his total sea-faring experience consisted of one trip across the Irish Sea and back which made him feel rather ill. When I was young, had he dyed his impressive beard white he would have stood a good chance of getting the part of “Captain Birdseye” in the fish finger adverts on the telly. Nowadays, Henry2 would be a prime candidate for recognition as a “Care in the Community” patient. Once, when the local Unemployment Exchange -Social Security Office - paid him with crisp new banknotes one Thursday morning, he held a kitchen knife to a civil servant’s throat on the grounds that they were trying to entrap him. Presumably he imagined a snatch-squad coming to kick his door in, compare his money with a list of counterfeits, find matches and drag him off to the police barracks. Who knows what was going through his head?

An even more deserving candidate for the title “Newry Champion Head-the-Ball” was Henry3. He delivered “The Belfast Telegraph” on his bicycle. By way of amusement while doing this, he had the disconcerting habit of spitting at people on the pavements as he cycled past. Just as disconcerting was his habit of buying a ticket to the balcony of the Savoy cinema in Monaghan Street. Once installed in the front row, he would shine a torch at the patrons in the stalls below, deliver the occasional well-aimed “clocker”, and sometimes even drop burning matches on their heads to an accompaniment of a rich selection of swear-words. What I could never understand was that although he was always chucked out before some enraged cinema-goer inflicted actual bodily harm on him, he was always sold a ticket the next time he came back. One can only assume that fierce competition from the Frontier and the Imperial meant that every ticket sold was part of a serious struggle for survival.

As with everything else, the cinemas in Newry were divided along what can only be described as sectarian lines. The Savoy was Protestant-owned, the Frontier and Imperial Catholic-owned. The Frontier showed mostly Universal and RKO films, the Savoy Rank and Twentieth-Century Fox, for example. Thus, in 1953, the Savoy showed a newsreel of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second. The local IRA dutifully planted a bomb in the Savoy in retaliation for this outrage, and the place was gutted minutes after an audience had left. But every cloud has a silver lining, and the rebuild saw the installation of a wide screen and I was able to watch the Cinemascope production of “The Robe” with my father as a result of this act of Republican revenge. The Statue of Liberty symbol at the beginning of Columbia films was believed by all the local kids to be the Virgin Mary. This feeling was reinforced for us all when one Saturday morning there was a showing of “The Song of Bernadette”, the story of the appearance of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. Before the film began, a local priest got up in front of the screen and delivered a spiel about God and the Virgin Mary (mostly about Mary) and we were all instructed to kneel while he said a prayer. Everybody squeezed down in the narrow greasy gap between the rows, Protestant and Catholic alike.

Before television came along, the cinemas were the most popular source of shared entertainment for kids. Every Saturday morning, if we could wheedle the money out of our parents, we all trooped along to The Savoy or The Frontier to feed on a diet of cowboy films and the serials which were screened before the main feature. The stars of the serials and the films became more familiar to us than relatiives we didn't see very often. Often, we could not distinguish between the stars and the characters they played. Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Randolph Scott, Jeff Chandler, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Joe E. Brown, Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autrey, Roy Rogers, Johnny Weissmuller, Lex Barker, Gordon Scott (it was rather confusing to discover that between one week and the next Tarzan had changed beyond recognition - but at least Cheetah the Chimp provided some continuity). Audie Murphy was one of my favourites, and someone always said as we left the cinema "You know he won more medals than anyone else in the Americam army in the war". Is it true? I suppose I could use the web to look it up, but I prefer to think of him as a celluloid hero. As the lights went down each Saturday morning in The Savoy, a mass migration occurred in the auditorium. This was occasioned by the fact that the front half contained hard, wooden tip-up seats which were very uncomfortable. The rear half had soft upholstered seats. But we couldn't afford the sixpence they cost, so we all bought thrupenny tickets to the front. As soon as the lights went down, we all crawled under the seats to the back. This strategem was denied those of ample proportions. Our favourite moments came in those cowboys-and-indians films when the US cavalry sentry was standing in the dark and a fierce warrior would creep closer and closer, knife in hand, to do him in. Then we'd all shout "look out behine ya!". It never did any good, though. The bits we hated involved our heroes embracing and even kissing women. Such lulls in the action led to a total switch-off of attention with much shouting and general restlessness until the guns started cracking and the arrows began whizzing again.

The sectarian divide in Newry was not rigid, but was made evident by the everyday shopping habits of the townsfolk. For example, Prods got their newspapers from Thompsons in Sugar Island, Papes from the likes of Eamonn Fitzpatrick in North Street. Bennett’s down by the post office in Hill Street were happily situated nearly opposite the cathedral and did a good line in Catholic pictures and statuettes. “The Mascot” in Marcus Square was probably the smallest shop in Europe but was patronised by all. Grocers, butchers (such as the Moffatts (Protestant) and the Hughes (Catholic)) and even the undertakers got most of their business from their own “side”. Bertie Trodden the barber cut a lot of Protestant hair, and Jimmy Magee snipped away at the Catholics. Happily, my parents never bothered about this kind of thing, so I managed to get through my childhood without being soured by bigotry. I can remember one little incident which helped to develop this happy state. When the Savoy Cinema was blown up by the IRA, I came racing home for dinner to my granny’s house and burst into the tiny living-room shouting “the Catholics blew up the Savoy!”. Kathleen Hughes, her Catholic next-door neighbour, who, unknown to me, was sitting behind the opened door, firmly informed me that the dire deed had been done by the IRA, not by “the Catholics”. This was a distinction which had not occurred to my seven-year old brain. Looking back, I think that it was a formative moment.

Mentioning this incident puts me in mind of the almost "innocent" state of anti-British terrorism in the Fifties. The IRA were a pretty amateurish bunch who, in the main, contented themselves with blowing up objects as opposed to people. Thus, telephone poles and local electricity sub-stations tended to be their preferred targets. When one thinks of the barbaric outrages of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties it is almost possible to look back to the Fifties and early Sixties with a degree of nostalgic longing. Picture this: the local IRA decide to plant a bomb in the Labour exchange (now Social Security Office)in Hill Street, the town's main shopping thoroughfare, equivalent to an American Main Street, an English High Street. They plant the bomb at gunpoint, the staff leg it out of the building, and a bloke rides a bicycle up and down the street shouting "Clear the street - there's a bomb goin' off in the Broo" ("broo" - corruption of (Employment) "Bureau")). Talk about "The Little World of Don Camillo" (Giovanni Guareschi). Things became much more serious during the IRA campaign which started in 1956 - the "hard" men were making their presence felt. But the murders of young policemen turned many supporters against them and it wasn't until the late sixties that support would re-appear at a significant level. (For a list which includes various groups who have helped to turn the North into a hell-hole in the last thirty-five years, click here). Capitalism, of course, reared its ugly head - as it always does. So the Protestant building contractor who always got the contract for replacing the wooden British Customs post at Killen on the boder, which was blown up on a regular basis, was rumoured to keep the timber he used for that particular job permanently soaking in a huge tank of creosote, the better to burn down completely when the next bomb was set off.